Transformers for Historical Handwritten Text Recognition

Killian Barrere (1, 2, 3) , Yann Soullard (1, 2, 3) , Aurélie Lemaitre (1, 2, 3) , Bertrand Coüasnon (1, 2, 3)

1 UR - Université de Rennes
2 INTUIDOC - Intuitive user-interaction for document
3 IRISA-D6 - MEDIA ET INTERACTIONS

Handwritten documents are recently getting more and more publicly available, but searching efficiently information through them is difficult. Handwritten Text Recognition systems automatically transcribe documents and offer excellent solutions to make the content of handwritten documents available. Neural networks are currently the state-of-the-art approaches for this task. Recently, Transformer architectures have gained in popularity in many fields. We present the works we have done so far toward an efficient architecture using transformer layers for the field of Handwritten Text Recognition. Architectures using Transformer for Handwritten Text Recognition are presented. Our architectures aim to replace recurrent layers with transformers, while combining optical recognition and language modeling in end-to-end model. We manage to obtain state-of-the-art results on the IAM dataset with one of our architecture.

Domaines: Recherche d'information [cs.IR]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]; Apprentissage [cs.LG]

Killian Barrere, Yann Soullard, Aurélie Lemaitre, Bertrand Coüasnon. Transformers for Historical Handwritten Text Recognition. Doctoral Consortium - ICDAR 2021, Nibal Nayef and Jean-Christophe Burie, Sep 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland. ⟨hal-03485262⟩